Globe Telecom shares continuing cloud journey

Globe's cloud journey.

While some speakers at the VMware CIO Leadership Forum 2017 in Singapore are against bimodal IT, Pebbles Sy-Manalang, CIO, Globe Telecom, is all for it. Sy-Manalang spoke at a session titled Digital Transformation - A CIO Perspective, about how Globe Telecom has transformed itself in recent years.

"What it means for us is that we should be able to support rapid innovation while keeping our operations stable," she explained. "We can't shift from pure waterfall to pure agile (immediately), but won't work with two teams."

The company started off revamping its networking infrastructure, billing system as well as portfolio to focus on customers and a culture of collaboration, an experience which Sy-Manalang liked to "changing the engine while the plane is flying".

Sy-Manalang describes Globe Telecom's digital transformation journey and what it has meant for the company and employees.

Globe Telecom has gained market share, become the No. 1 mobile brand in the Philippines, and changed the way customers use digital brands such as Facebook, Spotify and Netflix. the Facebook and Spotify experiences are customised for Globe, for example, Sy-Manalang said.

"We made a bet and it paid off," she said.

Beating the competition is not Globe Telecom's end-game however. "Our success allowed us not just to serve as a telecom company but as a Filipino company. We realised we had a responsibility to help," she said.

Today, Globe Telecom is working on creating better digital experiences for customers, Sy-Manalang said. It will continue to build its mobile network but also targets to connect 2 million homes with fibre by 2020.

Globe Telecom's transformation strategy involves making sure that employees understand the customer through immersion with different roles, and outsourcing the 'heavy lifting' of traditional IT to the cloud. Improving the customer experience, driving a culture of experimentation and speeding up time-to-market are all current goals for the company.

"We want to devote time and resources to what is really important which is driving business and remaining competitive," she said.

Sy-Manalang said that Globe Telecom's success is due to close partnerships with IT vendors. The company has been reducing the number of partners it works with, and VMware, AWS and Red Hat are some of 15 partners which it considers critical.

Globe Telecom started working with VMware in 2009, and by 2014 had decided to go cloud-first. "We shifted from asking why to which cloud," Sy-Manalang stated. "If any project requires physical servers, bare metal, you need the CEO's approval."

Globe Telecom settled in 2016 for multiple managed private clouds, as well as a significant investment in AWS. Two mission-critical systems that 'can't go down' are Globe Telecom's top-up platform, and prepaid promotion provisioning. Both are running today on VMware managed private clouds. "Latency is a consideration, privacy is a consideration," Sy-Manalang explained. "VMware has allowed us to produce and deploy new applications much faster," she said.

To drive the transformation to the cloud and evangelise cloud transformation practices a dedicated team at Globe Telecom's cloud centre of excellence oversees things. The cloud strategy reduced the time required to provision servers, and the 90-day lead time required from hardware purchase to commissioning it had turned into two days by the second year the strategy was in place. "Today we actually take it for granted. We have no timelines to show hardware procurement anymore," Sy-Manalang shared.

In 2017 Globe Telecom plans to continue the migration, working on at more complex legacy systems. "The architecture will be hybrid for many years to come but we're going through the process,
working on (the infrastructure) making sure cloud apps are architected," Sy-Manalang said. "There are a lot of things you can't do if the apps are not ready."

Globe Telecom is also preparing the ecosystem by training and certifying employees and partners, including 20 cloud architects. A unified cloud environment which is largely automated, self-healing and self-optimising is another goal, and all data centres should be consolidated in the next three years, she added.

Interested?

Watch the Instavideo of a snippet of Sy-Manalang's talk

posted from Bloggeroid